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Facebook In Legal Wrangle With Hasbro
The massive success of the Scrabulous application for Facebook has lead to a conflict between the social networking site and toy company, Hasbro, the makers of the Scrabble board game. Scrabulous, a plug-in application for the Facebook website based on the popular board game Scrabble, has attracted a massive following in the past month, with more than 500,000 Facebook users reportedly playing it each day. The application, developed by two brothers, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, is claimed to be bringing in $25,000 a month in advertising revenue.
According to Fortune magazine, Hasbro sent Facebook a cease-and-desist letter claiming a breach of copyright at the start of 2008. Hasbro has previously shut down an online game called e-Scrabble in 2005 and recently concluded a deal with software publishing powerhouse Electronic Arts to develop an electronic and online version of Hasbro board games, including Scrabble and Monopoly.
Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble in the United States and Canada, while Mattel owns the rights in the rest of the world. According to a spokeswoman for Mattel in Britain, the letter was sent by Hasbro to Facebook in the United States and it is “currently reviewing [its] position regarding other countries”.
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